teach maths

Title: teach maths
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Description: "Maths" emerged as a topic, because I am going to an interview next Monday, regarding maths teaching at a school. 16.2.2008. I enjoyed the interview, but did not think it went very well. The head teacher looked quite stressed. The assistant principal got me to state some of my ideas in detail. But in hindsight I should have taken an arbitrary problem e.g. calculating e to the power of -0.5, and asked for her response, and given her some idea of how the class might have proceeded. (This is an actual question from a 2006 exam paper - it was given 2 marks, out of 120 for the whole 3 hour paper, which means that one might spend 3 minutes on this question). In fact, it is unthinkable that anyone today would solve this problem manually - it could be solved with a calculator in half a minute. The teacher is given the role of teacher, and is paid money usually. It does not follow from this that the class will function better if the teacher takes a "high profile". Propose to teach maths using only discussion. One person as scribe to make record of the meeting , one person as gatekeeper to allow one person at a time to speak. ALL exercises can be done as group discussion. NO homework is given. If the work is so important, why isn't it being done during class time? The language of maths is a dialect of English, or a pidgin English. Doing maths builds machinery in our brain. However, this is not intended to be given as a reason for doing maths - any activity we do builds machinery in our brain. What will we do? What topics will we look at? We will get a different kind of maths (or literature) if we use a discussion format, where everything can be questioned, rather than a lecture format where the lecturer is not interrupted. A discussion format could mean that we discuss a lot of things that are currently not being talked about. Suggested format: ONLY look at past exam papers. We could go very slowly. For example, we could easily spend 30 minutes on a question that would take 3 minutes in the exam. In fact, we could spend much more time than this if required. If time allowed (for studying past papers), we might look first at questions that appeared on more than one past paper. In fact, there is plenty of time to do this - in my approach to the syllabus, we will do nothing else but look at past papers and cooperate in preparing model answers. 26.06.2008. I have been given, and have accepted, the job for two weeks, starting 14.7.06. It is possible that the job will be extended to the end of the year. PLAN: Obtain sample exam questions for each of year 8 to year 12 (and perhaps for year 7 also). Judging on my experience at university, there was not time to read all the "text books", and a safer approach would be to attempt to work past exam papers, using lectures to fill in gaps, and reading only a small amount of the "text books" where needed. Applying this idea to high school, we will not attempt to look at more than a small percentage of the "text book", because trying to cover even 25% of the book in fine detail may mean that we are precluding more useful activities such as discussion. We can look at maths as a "holy grail" because it gives us tools we can use in many areas, e.g. policy analysis, engineering, medicine, building, ... We can look at high school as providing an opportunity to look at maths as a part of "cultural literacy". MY PROPOSAL IS THAT WE IN THE CLASS USE A METHOD OF "policy analysis" known as the "logic model" to investigate what we are doing in maths. We might begin by discussing "what is maths", and why we are in the class. (Firstly, I am there because I am being paid. There is an expectation that I will help students to get better grades than they would otherwise have got). The logic model encourages or requires us to ask questions about why things are being done, and to assess the answers - e.g. why we believe an argument that is being made.
Tags: maths, teach,
Author: richardmullins44